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This is old news for some of you, but I’ll risk boring you for the sake of anyone who hasn’t heard the story, which is an important one — certainly more important than most of the tripe I publish.
Microsoft is a successful company. They have huge amounts of cash, and access to the best and brightest minds on the planet. This makes their failures especially poignant, because they have fewer excuses than most anybody else.
The basic story is that Microsoft published a web page about a former Mac user who switched to Windows 2000. This was an apparent response to Apple’s “Switchers” campaign, which offers the reverse — stories of ex-Windows users who found happiness in the MacOS.
The frightening-but-funny reality is that Microsoft’s “switcher” story is a complete fabrication. For example, the image of the alleged switcher is a stock photo. And the unnamed switcher, when she came out of hiding, turns out to be an employee of the PR firm that Microsoft had hired to create the testimonial.
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber posted an insightful analysis of the story and ensuing cover-up and denials. Part 1: Microsoft’s Answer to Ellen Feiss; part 2: Microsoft Make-Up
(Ellen Feiss, BTW, is one of Apple’s “Switchers.”)
Best quote, from Dave Winer as quoted by Gruber: “You’d think Microsoft could at least find one real person to say they made the switch from Mac to Windows and were happy about it.”
I didn’t make it to the mailbox yesterday, so today there was a double load of catalog crap squeezed from the ass of retail America: over 4 lbs total. That is not a typo — I had four pounds of catalogs in my mailbox. Lands End Kids, MacConnection, Art Institute of Chicago, Sundance (faux-rugged clothing for SUV drivers), Macy’s, Duncraft “Living with Nature” (gourmet birdseed?!), J. Jill (leisure clothing for old people), The Sharper Image (what kind of pocket translator defines you as a person?), Smith and Noble, Smith & Hawken, you’d like me to list Smith & Wesson but it’s probably not legal to advertise guns via direct mail — be very glad — Brookstone Hard-to-Find Tools (really, how hard can it be anymore? Brookstone has been selling the same stuff for 10 years.), Hold Everything, Chamber(pot)s by Williams Sonoma, L.L.Bean Winter Clothing, Dance Distributors. What a waste. Someday soon we’ll be mining landfills for fuel, and the enormous piles of discarded advertising will strike shame into our souls. How did this world go so wrong?
On that topic, I had a visitor to the house today. I was poring over Artisan Baking, scaling a bread recipe for party this weekend, with music cranked up in the background. Well, foreground. Maybe even surround-ground. The walls were shaking, and it wasn’t just because I was mirroring the double-bass line on the kitchen floor.
The doorbell rang. This is unusual. I’m too far out to get any solicitors, and most of the folks I want to find me can’t, like the time Airborne Express took three days to deliver an “overnight” package. There was a coincidental lull in the music, one of those sensitive vocals-and-keyboards passages that metal bands put in to maximize the aural contrast at the next 200 mph chorus, with multiple layers of fingerboard guitar solos and four-limbed drum fills playing in unison at inhuman speeds. (This is Elegy’s Forbidden Fruit album, the closest thing to speed-metal that I own.)
Anyway, I opened the door to see a heavyset but kind-looking woman clutching a stack of propaganda. “Religious pilgrim” was my immediate conclusion. I couldn’t see the Watchtower magazine, but I sensed it. Or maybe I caught a whiff of incense and desperation on the breeze. She leapt right into her pitch, with a line like “How did this world go so wrong?” For a second I thought I’d made a bad call, maybe she was here from the post office or the DMA, but junkmail is my irrational obsession, not hers.
I smiled, tuning out the spiel while I waited for a pause so I could deliver my “get the heck off my porch” message, tarted up to match her gingham of course. While I waited, I realized that the quiet part of the Elegy song was about to end. Remember, the stereo was still cranked up just behind me in the living room.
The “intro to damnation” speech was winding its way down, too. I listened to the speech, and the music, and the speech, and the music, back and forth in slow motion as they converged. The woman had closed with a question, and it was a total Dale Carnegie question I had to answer “yes” to, assuming I really was reading a cookbook and not, I don’t know, rinsing sacrificial calf blood off my Sawzall when she rang the doorbell, and in that pause when I was juggling a reply around in my head, Elegy’s rhythm section (i.e. the entire band) kicked in at full throttle, and a wall of high-volume heavy metal annihilation blasted across the room and smacked the woman in the face, which took on a sort of resigned “I’m in the wrong place, aren’t I” look, and my smile got a little bit bigger and a lot more genuine, as if to say, Yes, I’m the person your pastor warned you about.
After she left, I queued up I Am Woman: The Essential Helen Reddy Collection, just to spite her.
Fascinating reading: Great Moments in Science
The author, Karl Kruszelnicki, has a number of advanced degrees in science and a knack for writing up interesting bits of scientific history.
The Christmas shopping season has already begun. I believe the traditional start is one day after Thanksgiving, because Americans only have the mental capacity to plan one holiday at a time, and if Chrismas shopping really began this early, kids could end up with miniature roasted turkeys in their stockings, and little pools of potatoes and gravy coagulating beneath where they’ve leaked out through the toe.
Nonetheless, the catalog onslaught has begun. I fear my mailbox. Inside, every day, two or three glossy full-color catalogs appear, hawking everything from egg coddlers to synthetic-fiber briefs.
The worst of it is, the catalogs I’m drowning in aren’t even mine. Years of guarding my address have paid off — I get very little junk mail. The current deluge is for the people who just moved out of this house. Now I know why they moved away from this amazing place… they’d bought so much crap via mail-order that they ran out of space to store it all. Or maybe they’d spent so much on shipping that they couldn’t make their mortgage payments.
They received nearly every specialty-clothing catalog I’ve ever seen (J Crew, LL Bean, Patagonia), and some obscure titles that probably appeal to a smaller audience (mysportbra.com?!). They had more travel-goods and gadget catalogs than SkyMall (Sharper Image, Hammacher Schlemmer, Brookstone, Herrington, Magellan’s, Travelsmith). And they had the oddball base covered too, especially the countrified kitsch variety (American Girl, Hearth and Plow). The shocking thing is that each one of these catalogs had a customer ID on the back, indicating that the vendors hadn’t simply rented the name and address — the people who used to live here had actually bought stuff from every one of these companies.
Wait, did I forget housewares? (Williams Sonoma, Crate and Barrel, Hold Everything, Macy’s). They sure haven’t forgotten me. Macy’s puts junk in my mailbox three days/week.
One of the ironies of my life is that I always loved to receive mail. All manner of exciting things could show up. But as I’ve gotten older, this simple pleasure has been stripped away by a world full of shysters. Nowadays, most of the mail I receive makes me angry or depressed: bills, political pitches, the inevitable catalogs, mail-grams from unknown mortgage brokers that quote the details of my mortgage in a terribly misguided effort to convince me that I should trust them with my money. (Perhaps that’s a rant for another time, but excuse me, why is the amount of my loan considered public knowledge?)
At my old house, it would occasionally happen that we’d get no mail. At the time, those days made me a little sad, as if I’d missed out on something. Now, I look forward to the quiet. So does the guy who hauls away my recycling.
Five years ago, before moving out here into the boondocks, I went into the local Post Office to rent a Box. The postal clerk was the most engaging, friendly, honest and helpful person I’d met in weeks — of course, I’d been dealing almost exclusively with bankers, brokers, and real estate agents at the time, so perhaps this isn’t saying much. This guy made an impression, though.
Soon we moved here, and I ended up going to the post office every couple of days to pick up my mail, which for lack of available PO Boxes was being forwarded to “general delivery.” I suppose that option exists at every post office, but I don’t suppose clerks in big-city post offices recognize their customers and greet them by name, saying “Let me get your mail.” I felt like the theme song from Cheers. This became my “life in a small town” story (replaced over time with other warm-and-fuzzy small-town experiences like neighbors sharing produce and meeting reclusive local celebrities and the inevitable septic-tank pumping).
Years passed. I stopped going to the post office as often, because that would entail putting on shoes. But I noticed something that made me uncomfortable about my favorite postal clerk — I could swear I remembered his name, but the tag on his shirt said something else. Was he borrowing a shirt that day? It was unsettling, but again, I didn’t go to the post office too frequently any more, so I never built up enough data to be certain.
Another year or two passed. I’d given up on addressing the clerk, for fear of getting his name wrong. And he didn’t seem to recognize me any more, either. Until last week… when he saw me come in, pushed away the little sign at his station reading “closed”, and called out a hearty greeting. “Is it Matthew or Michael?” he asked me, which made me laugh because often my parents (who have sons named Matthew and Michael) ask me the same thing. But here’s the impressive part — from the dregs of neglected synapses I managed to recover the clerk’s original name, the one he’d introduced himself to me as, and the mysterious shirt-name from years later, and asked him the same question back. I was extremely impressed with myself. It turns out that both the names I remembered were correct; the clerk had changed his name in the year after I moved here. And, he got new shirts.
Anyway, it was “nice to be seen,” as a friend used to say.
Let’s just put it right out in the open: this is a story about farting. If you’re easily offended — wait, never mind; you would have been offended a long time ago. Read on with my blessing.
I was sitting in a stadium of 80,000 people on a gorgeous Fall day, all blue skies and warm sun, with my favorite team (inasmuch as I can be said to have a favorite team, given that what I know about college football can be inscribed in 48-point Aachen Bold across the spine of the thinnest of the six O’Reilly titles in my collection) fighting the good fight down there on the field, when, four or five times during the first half, the stench of sphincter came washing across the stands. It was rank.
One row below me, a group of fellow sufferers were waving their hands in front of their faces, in what appeared to be some kind of failing tribal/pagan ritual to convince the wind god to blow the other way. It was similar to, and as ineffective as the flapping motion some people make when they put a forkful of 200° food in their mouths and realize that the only thing that would damage more tissue would be spitting it out, so they wave one hand (two if it’s really hot) and widen their eyes until the heat dissipates, or all the nerves in their mouths die from the third-degree burn, whichever comes first. The women were sitting with their sweatshirts pulled up over their noses. After the third attack, one of the guys announced to everyone in earshot, or maybe nose-shot, “OK, that’s it. Someone needs to stop farting right now.”
We suffered twice more, and then to our relief it was halftime, and we all said a little prayer of thanks (it’s a Catholic university, after all) that the perp might go vent his horrible bowels in the restroom, or at least somewhere downwind.
And then the marching band came on the field and played “Classical Gas.” Seriously.
Shortly after moving into the new house, I took the fancy double oven for a test-bake. I preheated the pizza stone, then slid a flax-sourdough boule on top. I knew immediately that something was wrong, because my face has been calibrated over time to recognize what 500°F feels like when I pull open the oven door. This oven felt cold.
The bake went poorly. There was no “oven spring,” meaning the bread did not rise during the bake, and it took about twice as long to cook as it should have.
So, I dug through a box of disused kitchen implements to find my ancient, bent, burned, not-especially-reliable oven thermometer. I had to do a sanity check — was the oven off, or was I? At four years, the oven is a lot younger than I am, but I suspect I have more experience baking.
The thermometer proved me right: the oven was cold by 75°F. And because the oven control maxes out at 500°, I could not simply compensate by raising the temperature. That is, I needed 500°, but could get only 425°.
This oven is a fancy computerized unit, so I checked the manual to see if there is a calibration mechanism. There is, in fact, but it failed to function as described. Curiously, the calibration procedure includes this senseless instruction:
DO NOT measure oven temperature with a thermometer. Opening the oven door will lower the temperature and give you an inaccurate reading. Also, the thermometer temperature reading will change as your oven cycles.
This struck me as suspicious, like when Microsoft describes their software as secure but refuses to publish the details so experts can verify their claims. Not that I’m an oven expert, but, what the heck, measuring oven temperature isn’t exactly cryptanalysis either.
When the repair guy showed up to re-calibrate the oven, I described that I’d measured the temperature and found it to be low by 75°. He looked at me disdainfully and asked, “It wasn’t a coil-spring thermometer, was it? Those are notoriously inaccurate.” And then as he unwrapped his fancy Digital Thermocouple With Remote Probe he made a little condescending chuckling sound and said, “These are a little more accurate,” but by “little” he meant “lot”, just like I do when I say he was a “little” rude.
He wore his superiority like a black leather jacket. I endured it like a guy who enjoys watching know-it-all jerks eat black leather crow when they have to admit they’re wrong. It didn’t take long — about 75° less time than he expected, in fact.
Of course he tried to escape without giving me the details. “The computer is blown,” he said on the way out the door, “so we’ll call you with an estimate.”
“Oh, did it measure low?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, volunteering nothing and pulling the door shut. I had no problem with this… It’s my door; I opened it up again.
“How low was it?” I called at his back as he quick-stepped down the stairs.
“Erm, 75°” he coughed over his shoulder. Imagine that.
The ridiculous postscript to this story is that the new controller board costs $860, installed. The list price on the oven, four years ago, was $829. I guess Whirlpool makes its money on parts.
My vision sucks like a vacuum with a brand-new bag. My eyesight is so poor, the optometrist doesn’t say “what’s the smallest line you can read;” he says, “Just point at the wall.” The kids didn’t call me “four eyes” because that wouldn’t have counted the two I was born with.
So I’ve been considering surgery. I don’t consider that lightly; I’m terrified. As poorly as my eyes work, they are critically important to me. I realize the value of decent eyesight because I so rarely enjoy it. In other words, it’s easy for me to imagine being blind, at least functionally so, because that’s how I wake up every day.
A friend with a comparable case of myopia was telling me about his recent LASIK experience. He’d been impressed at how easy and painless the whole prodecure was. He summed it up as a “non-event.” With admirable nonchalance he described the operation: the cocaine drops to deaden the nerves in the eyeball… the insertion of a speculum to keep the lids open… the incising of tissue from the cornea… the reshaping of the stroma via excimer laser…
The longer he talked, the more nauseous I became. True, I’d had a number of beers the night before, and the number was about 12, so I had a head-start on nausea. But the idea of someone taking a knife and slicing off the front of my eye is enough to make me writhe. I had to squat down on the grass and do breathing exercises.
I’m well aware that, afterwards, painful and grotesque medical experiences make fun stories, as if all the fear and anxiety suffered in advance pay off in entertainment value months and years later. I’m sure I could work up the courage to pay someone lots of money to cut a flap in my eyeball and shoot a laser into my skull… as evidenced by my friend’s experience, it makes a great story, and he wasn’t even going for the gross-out. My version would doubtless inspire acute squirming, even in people who weren’t hung over. And yet, somehow, I’m still ambivalent.
Surgicaleyes.org is a terrific resource, in both the common meanings of the word. The Image Center provides simulations of post-surgery vision abnormalities. The Bulletin Board contains tens of thousands of messages from doctors and patients, providing hundreds of pages of intelligent, generally well-researched commentary. It’s epic.
John — thanks for the inspiration, the story, and the link.
So it’s Wednesday, and I’m thinking I should write something for my journal, and as in all quests I take my first step: shove the plan aside and read my email instead.
But there’s nothing there, because I checked my email 10 seconds ago. And then I remember that Wednesday is “Cheap Eats” day, and I decide I’ll write about my celebrity neighbor and his irreverent foodie newspaper column, which is published Wednesdays in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
Being constantly on guard for your welfare, and maximizing at all times your debris.com entertainment dollar (be a good lad now and click a banner eh?) (that’s a pitiful ad-revenue joke from the depths of 1999 for you) (you can forget, after that display, whatever it was I was trying to claim about providing anything resembling entertainment I guess) I decided to read today’s column before writing about it, although, really, the real reason was because it allowed me to postpone the somewhat arduous task of composing words for this space for a few minutes longer.
And then I got the shock of the week, besides last night at 2:30 AM when I was trying to sleep after having just seen Red Dragon and the noises outside the bedroom sounded like the neighborhood deer and turkeys but might also have been nutballs with buckknives and soft-palate defects sitting in a tree, when I read about myself in the second paragraph.
Honestly, I didn’t plan this. It’s just synchronicity.
Read about me (!) — Cheap Eats 10/9/02
Finally, after a year’s delay, the Triumvirat remasters are shipping. I know you’ve never heard of Triumvirat, but if you own any of these classic concept albums:
or, really, any neo-progressive rock from Yes, Genesis, Camel, Transatlantic, Spock’s Beard, ELP, Porcupine Tree, etc., then you ought to check out these two albums:
Nostalgia is powerful juju. A dozen friends, caught it its diamond-plated and keen-edged grip, were forced to strap drums about their persons and march in formation around a cold asphalt parking lot at 7:30 on a Saturday morning, just a few hours after having closed down area bars the evening before. This was described to me as fun, although that was earlier, before the hangovers and back pain had set in.
Still, the juju reached me up in the stands, and I had moments of regret about my decision to participate in the marching-band reunion only in my traditional capacities, drinking, storytelling, inspiring of embarrassed laughter. (Hey, it’s a knack.)
I have fond and vivid memories of my college years (and, given the types of recreation I pursued at the time, I have a number of other memories that come entirely from secondhand accounts) and none of it seems that long ago. That’s my subjective time. This weekend I got a faceful of perspective, and I realized, deeply and truly, what an old geezer I’ve become. And I don’t believe I’m going to age gracefully. This was proved over the weekend, when instead of pursuing activities suitable for my, err, current level of maturity, e.g. sitting around a warm fireplace with a blanket over my knees waiting for the kind nurse to come collect my teeth, I went carousing, and felt pain. After two such nights, I woke up to find my knuckles raw and bleeding — not because I got into a fight, not at all. I think it’s because I’d regressed so far the night before, my hands were actually dragging on the ground.
(The true explanation is even more pitiful: I’d forgotten to pack hand lotion. Sigh.)
I realized with dismay that the enormous pile of cash recently spent by my alma mater to remodel its stadium did not include sufficient budget for bathrooms. Or perhaps the designers were attempting to match the existing architectural style, and keep with tradition, for in the men’s rooms they’ve installed troughs in lieu of urinals.
There are a number of reasons why troughs might be appropriate, or even preferable. As one friend remarked, if a stadium patron is feeling discomfort and possesses an urgent desire to use this sort of facility, a trough tends to be more accomodating, in the sense that it’s somewhat easier to crowd around it without any of the social pressure that would prohibit the alternative (sharing a urinal).
One might suppose that troughs are more space-efficient than urinals. Looking at a long wall of troughs, it’s easy enough to imagine dozens of men standing elbow to elbow. But this projection is inaccurate. Indeed, I believe that the overall throughput of a trough-equipped restroom is lower than that of a more, or in this case less-traditionally fixtured restroom.
During my long wait in line, I immediately saw two reasons why. The first is that men tend not to want to stand too close to one another in the restroom. Lines had formed at 3' intervals — urinal spacing, I realized — and it was clear that everyone acted as if privacy partitions separated each line.
The other problem is more serious. I stood in line for nearly ten minutes, which is an interminably long time for a person who’d just sucked down two liters of water. There were only a handful of guys ahead of me, but each one took minutes: a few seconds to approach the trough and arrange the necessary interfaces as it were, maybe 15 seconds to actually urinate, and 90 seconds in between to excise whatever demons had taken over the circuitboard, to allow nature to complete its call. In two words, the trough system is crippled by stage fright.
That, or everyone had prostate trouble. Maybe next time I should use the restrooms in the student section.
OK, I’m better now. Feel free to rehash this analysis at your next office lunch gathering or cocktail party.
When I travel, I resist all conscious temptations to touch anything, especially my face. I don’t mean to sound all Howard Hughes, but I do think it’s possible to contract some bad afflictions in public areas, which are basically swimming in other people’s DNA. Judging from my experience of fellow travelers, I could contract grime, body odor, halitosis, poor fashion sense, or an accent.
So I’ve been amused and, as is more frequently the case, irritated by worldwide efforts over the past few years to fully automate public restrooms. For example, many airport sinks can sense when hands are beneath the faucet. The idea of this is brilliant — because if there’s one spot of concentrated filth in a restroom, it’s the faucet handle, as that’s the last thing everyone touches when their hands are dirty. These are so coated with noxious bacteria that there’s just no point washing your hands if you’re going to turn the water back off afterwards.
(Handy travel-safety tip: don’t touch the door handle either.)
The problem with the auto-faucet idea, as you have no doubt experienced, as that is is implemented poorly in almost all cases. Or am I the only person who invariably gets a sink that turns the water on and off randomly, or not at all, no matter how much I’m waving my hands and poking at sensors? Honestly, some of the sensors I’ve encountered are triggered by only one action: moving to the next sink in line.
Besides the auto-faucet, I’ve seen the toilets that flush automatically, and at totally random times, like when I walk past a row of them and they all flush in turn. I’ve seen the hot-air hand dryers that turn on and off automatically. What I like best about these is that they’ve allowed the dryer vendors to finally move to iconographic directions, a real improvement given that every single set of English-language dryer instructions on the planet had been defaced in exactly the same way (“1. Press butt. 2. Rub hands under arm.” etc.).
I’ve seen lights connected to motion sensors (which discourages loitering in the stall, I can tell you). And I’ve seen the latest innovation, the toilet that changes its own seat cover, although I think there may really only be two seatcovers in that machine, and they just switch back and forth. You can try this yourself — trigger the switch seven or eight times. I’ll bet you each one looks exactly the same! You’ve been warned.
My Powerbook came with both OS 9.2 and 10.1 installed. I used 9.2 only long enough to reset the default OS preference… and I liked OS X immediately. Within a few hours’ work I had a complete web-development environment running on it: apache, php, mysql, and BBEdit. I was beyond pleased: I was smug.
Apple announced the new version of OS X with much fanfare. Reviews have been positive. And I was itching to reformat my disk to take OS 9.2 off, to satisfy an admittedly irrational urge to purify my system, and recover a few MB of space on the disk, as if I’d ever actually collect 30 GB worth of data useful enough to save.
So I wiped the disk, installed 10.2, and have been struggling ever since. The system feels a lot slower. Critical apps have not been ported. It’s weird, and unfortunate, and I’m not very happy.
Part of the problem is my fault… defaulting to familiar command-line tools, I made a backup of some preference files with the UNIX tar utility, which I’ve since learned is inadequate because (in its default mode) it does not copy resource forks. As a result, my backed-up preferences were useless and I had to re-configure several complicated apps, at a cost of two evenings’ time.
Fortunately I don’t rely on this machine for day-to-day work… mostly I just write journal entries on it, and you know how rarely that happens.
